Yesterday we pushed a candidate for Opera Next 16. I’m not surprised that many of you have figured it out already yesterday.

Features that we’ve added for this build are

support for W3C Geolocation API,

form auto-filler,

support for jump-lists on Windows 7/8,

presentation mode is now available also on Mac,

opera:flags – you can play with experimental features there. Please remember that this game might be dangerous (and bite),

Opera 16 is based on Chromium 29.

Please feel free to test and leave us comments – if you are not on the Next stream yet, go ahead and download it from attached links.

Opera and Opera Next run as separate installs so you can still use Opera 15 while running Opera Next 16 side by side to try out the new things. Opera Next 16 will also automatically update itself so you'll always have the latest build.

Usually, the first few comments are about the roadmap, so here are the features we’re currently working on: bookmarks, synchronization (Opera Link), enhancements in tabs handling (ie pinning and visual tabs) and themes. Our new rapid release cycle means that you should see the first cut of some of these in a few weeks’ time.

It isn't dumbed down junk at all. They still offer version 12 to people who such features while they develop the new versions. They are brining the features back, but they're started from scratch. It'll take a while.

Glad to see they will be re-implementing bookmarks and proper tab management features, steps in the right direction. I do really miss opera 12's smooth scrolling though. Chromium has ridiculously bad smooth scrolling (doesn't work on all pages, and doesn't work at all with middle click autoscroll) and its still behind a flag, and the chrome/chromium developers don't seem to be making any efforts to improve it. I really wish opera would do some work in this area, opera 12 had/has fantastic smooth scrolling. At least in the opera 16 build the crappy flag is available, better than nothing

I hope they are careful with what they add. I like the speed the browser has. Other than a few small things (bookmarks, smooth scrolling, etc...), everything else should be an extension, so you can choose what you want your browser to be. I never used 1/2 the stuff they had in the old browser.

I hope they are careful with what they add. I like the speed the browser has. Other than a few small things (bookmarks, smooth scrolling, etc...), everything else should be an extension, so you can choose what you want your browser to be. I never used 1/2 the stuff they had in the old browser.

I think that is the wrong way to do it for a number of reasons. Extensions are unsupported, which means one day they work the next day they don't since the browser has moved on and extensions haven't (just look at Firefox extensions woes). Extensions add to cpu/memory usage, security potential security problems and these are never a good thing....etc. On the other hand built in features, like in Opera 12 and before, do not add to bloat unless activated, since the browser does not use them unless specifically requested. Built in features are completely supported by the dev team in features, security and stability. Look at the massive ammount of fetures that Opera 11.x/12.x had and it was still the lightest and most efficient browser on the market. You could open up more than 100 tabs and it would still work as it should. Try doing that in WebKit, Gecko or Trident browsers.

I don't think Opera Blink will ever be a match for old Opera, can only hope that either Opera will release Presto's source code or old Opera devs and CEO will start completely new browser development.

I hope they are careful with what they add. I like the speed the browser has. Other than a few small things (bookmarks, smooth scrolling, etc...), everything else should be an extension, so you can choose what you want your browser to be. I never used 1/2 the stuff they had in the old browser.

I disagree, because having extensions simply means your security goes down (extensions have access to a lot of browser info, and unless you audit the source code of all extensions you can never be sure what's happening with e.g. your browsing history). Not to mention extension authors dropping support for various reasons. I don't mean to demean your stance on extensions vs builtin functionality, however we already have browsers that have the barebones + extensions model. I wish Opera didn't just become another Chrome clone, but sadly it seems that way.